I remember sitting in a meeting with the technical directors of all the multiple food retailers and there were more of them then at which they agreed unanimously (an event that would be unheard of today) that GM was an extremely important technology. They said it was essential that it should not be given a bad press, because it had great potential for the industry. I later had lunch with a couple of Americans from Monsanto, to whom I conveyed this news, in between mouthfuls of risotto.
Perhaps it was an omen because it wasn't long before GM did get a bad press and 'Frankenfood' entered the vocabulary, despite Safeway's attempt to market GM tomato paste, which I remember eating as a canapé on a rather dry biscuit when it was launched at a Safeway store. It wasn't very nice!
An omen
And when it came to deciding which foods should have 'use-by' dates and which 'best-before' dates, Tesco's technical director vehemently believed butter should have a use-by date. He was out on a limb there and it took a lot of persuasion by the then Ministry for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF) to get him to change his mind in the interests of consistency. He wasn't a man for turning!
Tim Smith joining Tesco
It is interesting too that Tim Smith is joining Tesco, where Lucy Neville-Rolfe has been a director for some years. It was she who, when a rising star at the Ministry of Agriculture Fisheries and Food, headed up the Bill team for what was to become the Food Safety Act 1990 the over-arching Act for all food regulations, which has stood the test of time and must be one of the few Acts people find hard to fault.
The notion of traffic light labelling that Tesco is now embracing would probably have made Tesco's former technical director turn in his grave. A firm as powerful as Tesco, understandably, never likes to be told what to do and it resisted traffic light labelling when Deirdre Hutton, the then Food Standards Agency chair, tried to force it on an unwilling food industry. They waited until they could present it as something new.
So Tim Smith has his work cut out for him in taking Tesco forward in all the iterations of these long-standing issues that never seem to be resolved.
Clare Cheney, director general, Provision Trade Federation, is a regular columnist for our sister title Food Manufacture. To reserve your copy, telephone 0800 652 6512.